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Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

What does opinionated mean is this case? I read through a bit and didn't see any strong opinions.

# What's opinionated about Zero to Nix

Zero to Nix is opinionated because it advocates learning and using flakes and treating channels as deprecated. Zero to Nix also deviates from official recommendations in that it recommends installing Nix using Nix Installer rather than the official Nix installation script.

https://zero-to-nix.com/about#whats-opinionated-about-zero-t...

To me using the word opinionated is a deterrent. Any time I hear the word opinionated used it usually means the opinion(s) expressed are overly strong, stubborn, and/or negative. I was expecting the guide to call out issues with the official documentation in a way that could upset the people working on the official docs. But this is just an alternative method. Hardly opinionated.

The term has gained a specialized meaning in computing over the last decade or so.

> Opinionated software means that there is basically one right way to do things […] Non-opinionated software leaves lots of flexibility to the user https://stackoverflow.com/q/802050

Providing only a single answer for how to do things is helpful for beginners who haven’t yet formed a basis upon which to make informed decisions.

As a nix user I agree. Nix needs to make flakes stable ASAP. It creates a lot of confusion for new users and friction for getting started. "Do I use the thing that's deprecated but stable or the thing that's unstable but is the future of nix?"

Historically, the Nix ecosystem has arguably suffered a bit due to competing conventions throughout. Often, there have been many competing tools in the same space, and few standard, blessed conventions/interfaces.

'Opinionated' here means that the authors are trying to spare newbies from the 'paralysis by analysis' problem by making some (defensible) choices about what conventions to use on the reader's behalf up front.

These docs are going to 'lead' the official docs in the sense of coming out first because making things official will involve standardizing some of the interfaces used here and solidifying more consensus around them. (There is lots of organizational and technical work happening around that right now. You can follow along by looking for the minutes of various community team meetings on NixOS Discourse and following links from there, if you're curious.)

The most obvious example is that using the installer in the quick start enables the flakes and nix-command features automatically, even though they are still considered experimental by upstream.

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